Wirtz: They stayed, and helped mold Midland

Ralph E. Wirtz

Published 6:00 am, Sunday, February 12, 2017

Just weeks ago, I was visiting my son Joel and his family in Hinesville, Ga., home to the Army’s Ft. Stewart, and I noticed it is not unlike lots of towns surrounding Army bases, or for that matter, towns without large, active economic bases.

Hinesville is a small town of about 35,000 people about 40 miles west of Savannah. It calls itself one of the fastest growing cities in Georgia and that may well be. On the one side of town, a couple of malls have popped up and housing units are being built rather quickly.

The townspeople are nice and friendly. A small park, Bradwell Park, is tucked between Liberty County’s courthouses and the Hinesville City Hall. A few blocks away, a larger park has baseball fields, a pool, a track and a gathering place. The city takes pride in its two high schools, with their large football stadiums, and in a large, new auditorium. It has an active, although small, arts council.

But for a town that size, it has few of the recreational, artistic and cultural offerings that I’ve seen in many cities of equal size.

What Hinesville does have though is the Army and the thousands of soldiers it brings in each year. That spawns lots of small businesses which line the city’s main streets, and judging by all the accounts I’ve read, business is very good.

I talked with some of the people there and found that despite all the influx of people each year, little is made of the talent the Army brings in, for a host of reasons. Primarily, it is because the base is like a separate town, supplying the soldiers with many of the amenities seen elsewhere. In addition, the tours of the soldiers there are for a few years, so that just as the soldiers are learning the ropes, they are transferred.

There is the base history, which officially has been closed twice, and has seen its population range from about 100 to 55,000. The population surges in Hinesville, too, are recent. As recently as 1980, only 11,300 people lived there and it didn’t hit 30,000 until 2000.

I thought about these things on my drive home and how lucky Midland is to have had the economic base that The Dow Chemical Co. provides. But as importantly, perhaps more so, Midland is blessed with the people who have worked for Dow, and stayed here even after employment ended, and have used their time and their talents over the years to make the city a better place to grow up, to raise their families and to live out their final years.

In fact, it has been that talent that has set the philosophy of the city — that if there is a need, then it needs to be addressed in a systemic and logical fashion. It is a philosophy that encourages people to use their time and financial resources for the betterment of others. And it is a philosophy that starts at the top of Dow’s organization and filters through its employees.

Carl Gerstacker, former Dow treasurer, vice president and chairman of the board for 17 years, is a prime example of a man who adopted the Midland community and who used his mind to shape how a community responds to its needs.

After growing up in Cleveland and getting his education at the University of Michigan, Gerstacker joined Dow and quickly rose through the ranks, becoming chairman of the board in 1960, a position he retained until 1976.

Although his achievements could fill a book, and they do in E.N. Brandt’s “Chairman of the Board,” I am going to pick two to showcase the philosophy I alluded to earlier.

Along with Herbert H. Dow II, Gerstacker heard the rumblings of visitors about the ugliness of the city’s entryway off then I-75 (now U.S. 10) after its construction in the late 1960s. The entryway was Lyons Road, and along the route were dilapidated and rundown houses and unused Dow land. So Gerstacker and Dow helped organize the Midland Community Foundation, whose first task was to buy up the properties along the road, and build a Greenbelt into the city, a fresh entryway, which exists to this day.

So too does the foundation that was created. Now known as the Midland Area Community Foundation, it has more than $50 million in assets and is one of the most successful in the state.

His second achievement, and one successfully kept quiet until the publication of Brandt’s book in 2003, was Barley MacTavish, a regular feature for decades in this newspaper. Gerstacker regularly read the paper, and, Brandt writes, was surprised that so many people wrote the paper with relatively small problems involving small amounts of money, such as electricity cutoffs because of a lack of payment or no means of transportation because of a broken down auto. He was surprised that this was happening in such a prosperous community.

So he devised Barley along with longtime Daily News Editor Slim Rumple, and every so often for years after that he would deposit “a few thousand dollars” into a special account from which the Daily News could draw upon to “solve problems.”

Readers would write the paper with their problems, and the Daily News would work to address them. After Gerstacker died, his wife, Esther Gerstacker, continued the tradition. Today, it is funded with donations from the public.

Another example of the Midland philosophy is Dick Dolinski.

Dolinski came to Midland along with his wife, Donna, after growing up in the Detroit area and getting his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Detroit. His various career paths took him in and out of Midland for work, but his heart never left town. Probably the nicest, and the easiest, thing to say about Dolinski is that Kids Matter.

He is also president of Midland Kids First, a program targeting at-risk youth. Because he came, our youth are better served.

Nature might be all around us, but we appreciate it a little more, and understand it a whole lot better, because of some Midlanders who brought their passions for it to everyone.

Eugene Kenega, a native Midlander who spent 42 years working for Dow, was elected the first president of the Chippewa Nature Center, but his gift was not the legacy he and others left behind. Instead, it was the philosophy that nature mattered, and his tireless pursuit of making sure that we saved our piece of the world, and pieces of it elsewhere, while living in it.

At Dow, he worked on making the chemicals the company produced safer and their chemistry more understandable; in the community he worked on preserving public spaces so that everyone could enjoy the wonders of nature.

He served on the boards of the Midland Nature Club, the nature center and the Little Forks Conservancy, a group dedicated to preserving land along our region’s waterways. He worked with the Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization, the Fish and Wildlife Agency, NATO and hundreds of other groups around the world.

He was a world traveler, but was just as comfortable in his backyard along the Pine River, where he kept meticulous records of nature’s seasons, from the last snowfall of the winter to the first buds appearing on his flowers in the spring.

Pat Naegele came to Midland when her husband, Bob, accepted a position with Dow in the late 1940s and right from the beginning they made it their home. They worked as a team until Bob’s death in 2000 and Pat carried on their philosophy — bringing the arts and education to the people surrounding them. She was one of the founders of Northwood Town & Campus, was named a “Great Lady of the Center” by the Midland Center for the Arts and was a longtime member of the Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Arts.

She, too, was a longtime board member at Northwood, where a street, housing for married students and a scholarship program are all named after the industrious couple. Each year there is a luncheon during which the Naegele Scholars are presented their awards. That program was expanded this year.

These people, and there are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, more just like them, chose to make Midland their home, and they all contributed to making our lives better.

I know my life is more fully rounded for having known them, and benefiting from their philosophies that in our own way, we can volunteer our time and our resources to make things better. That they were drawn here by Dow, or that they stayed, has made us all richer.

Ralph E. Wirtz is the former managing editor of the Daily News and a freelance writer from Midland.